Summer of Our Discontent: The Age of Certainty and the Demise of Discourse

by Thomas Chatterton Williams

This in turn made it necessary to suppress dispassionate scientific probability and the aspiration to objective truth in favor of emotional, bitterly partisan team politics. And so what had started understandably and even nobly as regard for specific communities with racially correlated but variegated vulnerabilities—dense living conditions, high rates of comorbidities, disproportionate representation in fields designated “essential work,” lack of quality health care, and, not insignificantly, distrust of medical institutions—would soon give way to something intensely different: a full-blown moral panic that, in retrospect, it is possible to say with no exaggeration, touched on every facet of our collective, mediated existence and spawned a vicious counterreaction from the authoritarian right that further erodes our liberal democracy.